Having (I think, I’m not bothering to track down the location at the moment) before posited that landscape architecture, like architecture, possesses some strong disciplinary aptitude for something(s) like “spatial intelligence” (we landscape architects might call our version “geospatial intelligence”) which make the discipline at least as valuable when it is understood as a way of thinking as when it is understood as a professional body of techniques, and also believing that the capacity to interpret and represent spatial patterns within landscape is a particularly important manifestation of spatial intelligence within the discipline, I find examples like this extremely encouraging, because they indicate that there is some validity to that argument.

[Link via Damian Holmes (@landreader).]

Exactly what common ground do the modular megastructure of Plug-In City and the instrumentalized cityscapes of Civilization share? Both of these frameworks propose that urban growth is an algorithmic or procedural operation whereby “the city” (rather than a singular edifice) embodies the essence of Le Corbusier’s technophilic proclamations that architecture should function as a “machine for living”. These examples encapsulate systemic thinking in paper architecture and game design by suggesting the possibility of an instrumentalized, “plug and play” urbanism founded on the notion of homogeneous citizenry and the possibility of infinite expansion. These reductionist approaches to reading the city are equal parts utopian and monomaniacal – one need only look as far as McKenzie Wark for some sage advice regarding such totalizing thought: “The delusion of God games is that the gamer is in control when at the controller … But it is the game that plays the gamer … the gamer who is an avatar, in the sense of being the incarnation of an abstract principle.” While Wark is levying this warning at the players of strategy games it could well be heeded by urban planning firms who find themselves enmeshed in the market forces and legalities that dictate the scope of most city-scale projects.

If you enjoy the essay, note that Greg has posted a handful of additional thoughts here.

[Readers of mammoth will recall that this -- particularly the parallel between the god-like control assumed by the gamer and the fetishization of control in modernist urbanism --  is a topic which we have occasionally discussed.]